Hello everyone, I have been wondering in the last couple of days about SD's carrer mode. The reason why I started wondering about the carrer mode is that I recently bought myself a copy of GRID Autosport which is fun to play. To be honest the last games I bought were very nice sims, realistic, mind blowing graphics and so on but they almost all had a pretty boring career mode were you either have to always win or it's the Gran turismo type of career where you just race to get money to buy a new car or even the worst one of all the rfactor mod way where there's no sense in having a career mode because everything is already accessible.

I would like to open this thread to ask the comunity what they wish for a career mode and to try to make SD a fun game to play in that particular mode. Maybe if the community manages to agree with a particular idea we may submit a project to the devs. So throw in your ideas and opinions on what you would like SD's career mode to become.

In my opinion one of the best career modes I ever experienced was RACEDRIVER GRID (the first of the series) where you had to build an own team, buy the cars and hire a team mate, there was even a possibility to race for other teams to gather the money. Let's say the player starts with 125cc gokarts and then after performing his first season with his own gokart "team" get offers from other teams to pursue in a clio cup or a more advancer gokart series and by racing in those other teams he earns the money to buy a clio and run in the clio cup and so on. It could make SD very fun to play.

I like the idea to have money points but also reputation points that could be earned by racing (and why not online races too). These reputation points would help one to progress to faster cars.

The idea behind that is place goals for the player to achieve to make him having fun reaching them and not to simply put random races with random cars and throw the player in the soup.

What about your preferences and ideas ?

Again this is just a topic for debating ideas and no war of wich game is good or bad because that depends one everyone's feel.

Funny you should say that, i've been thinking about that recently I like the idea of reputation points, they could be awarded for things like not crashing, or having a good line in the race etc. As well as the career mode, we should keep the current game modes so that players can drive the faster cars, but maybe have 1 or 2 very fast cars that can only be driven if you unlock them in career mode first, such as Koenigsegg agera one:1, LaFerrari, Mclaren P1, Porsche 918 etcMaybe also have some challenges in career mode that feature cars that you have not unlocked yet, say a time trial in a '67 Mustang. If you beat a certain time, you unlock the Mustang.Definetely time to expand on the actual gameplay of Speed Dreams

I've thought about this topic too. I'd like to be able to race an unrealistically long career from the 36 Grand Prix cars (or earlier) to modern times. Yes, some kind of career points would be nice, and unlocking other cars or race series could be nice too. And I've thought about some kind of “missions” as well.

In a single line:The Driver's AdventureIn this form of "career", rather than grinding out for enough cash to move up to the next tier, players would be free to start in any tier except for the highest. This is done to establish a "character" in the "universe".

Why a "character"?Taking inspiration from anime-style dating games (yup!), your decisions on track have actual in-game consequences besides "win or lose". Wreck a driver from a certain team and you might just have lost your chance for a Formula A contract next season, for instance. Do well, complete objectives, get accolades, and you'd be able to switch disciplines or move up in the next tier. Stay loyal to a team and others might try to entice you with bigger deals, and so it goes on.

You also have a "character" in that other drivers and teams will react differently to your actions; some will let even a last-lap, last-corner sideswipe by, while other teams and drivers will go into full rage mode the moment you dent their cars. Beating other drivers might make them respect you... or hate you out of spite.

What's the point for us non-roleplayers?The idea is that each player's character might be made to meet a different major lifetime goal, or for the ultimate challenge, go for them all. There would be lots of different 'lifetime' goals but the big ones would be...The Triple Crown - Win three Tier 2 ChampionshipsThe Champion's Shield - Win the same Tier 2 or World Championship four times in a rowWorking Hero - Starting from the Novice Tier, win the Global Endurance Masters championship in 10 in-game yearsTeam Superstar - Sticking with the same team for at least four in-game years, win at least two championships at their highest tier (team must have a contract in Tier 2 or higher)

Using the current Speed Dreams cars and their downloadable extras, what would the classes and tiers be?Novice: The start of the journey, club racing cars.

Monoposto 5 (Grand Prix)

Trans-AM 2.0 Class (Touring)

Classic Stock Car (Oval Racing)

Rookie: The lowest rung on the ladder of Pro racing.

Supercar B Class (Street)

Trans-AM 5.0 Class (Touring)

Espana Leo Cup (Touring)

Monoposto 4 (Grand Prix)

Tier 3: The line between the pro and amateur ends here.

Supercar A Class (Street)

GT2 (Endurance)

American Stock Car(Oval Racing)

Boxer Super Cup (Touring)

Tier 2: The penultimate rung of the ladder, where only the greatest can transcend

American Monoposto 1 (Oval Racing)

GT1-JGTC (Endurance)

TRB1 (Touring)

Sector ZERO R Cup (Street)

Tier 1: Only the greatest drivers can succeed here, and the caliber of the competition is as such.

I like the idea but IMHO it should likely be set up slightly different, you should have three career "branches" each with their own "tiers" - open wheel, touring/stock, sports car. For added flavor, you could add a fourth one for strictly oval racing but i believe we are too far away from having all the categories needed.

The oval racing branch should start with some sort of a dirt midget class, then go sprint cars, lower tier NASCAR and end up with the top NASCAR tier.

The open wheel should of course start with MP5 and culminate with MP1. MPA1 should be the "consolation prize" for those who never quite make it into MP1.

Touring/stock - i guess going from TA20 to TRB1 is fine. Would be better with contemporary cars, starting with an one-make championship and ending with TRB.

Sportscar - start with Supercars, go to GT and finish with LSP1.

While the future available career choices should be heavily influenced by the previously taken path down these "branches", there should be a possibility to jump from one branch to others - depending on the level of success, you might get an "offer" to go from MPA1 to NASCAR or from top tier touring to GT, or from MP1 / MPA1 to LS1 or some such.

Finding a carreer mode that is satisfactory to everyone is certainly going to fail. As it can already be seen in this thread there are too many different types of players, which put emphasize on different aspects of the game.

There might be those who enjoy role-playing elements to whom contract negotiations with teams and sponsors are as important as the racing itself. On the otherhand there are gamers that do not want to be bothered with this organizational stuff and simply enjoy the racing part. Some enjoy having to work themselves from the lowest classes up to international events, while others again want to start their career immediatly inside a F1 racer ...

Now here comes my favoured solution to this issue:I think I read somewhere about plans to switch the implementation of the menu system to use Python. This could be implemented in such a way, that it enables others to simply script their own career modes to their liking. The idea is that one can quite easily implement any racing game one has ever dreamed of, by building on top of the simulation provided by SpeedDreams physics and graphics engine.

SpeedDreams would of course also have to be enhanced besides the menu system rework. One part would be to make the track representation more flexible in order to also allow hillclimbing tracks and rallye stages (maybe even off-road way-point finding competitions).Another thing maybe would be the data that is reported back to the menu-system / career mode manager. This should not only contain the ranking of the drivers and their lap times, but as already mentioned by others also 'soft results' as reliability of the driver, not crashing, aggressiveness etc.

Obviously the most important work would still be to restructure the menu system implementation. I think it would be really great to use Python for this case because it has the reputation to be easily picked up even by non-programmers. I'm curious if there are still any plans in this direction?